


Relief

by itdefiesimagination



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Anxiety, M/M, Postpartum Depression, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-18
Updated: 2014-10-18
Packaged: 2018-02-21 17:01:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2475719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itdefiesimagination/pseuds/itdefiesimagination
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"And everything crashed down around him now. All of it, every dishonest, selfish, stupid thing he’d done, the people he’d hurt, injured, and killed. They bore down – a phantom pressure on his chest and in his head. He saw them all at once, crowding into his line of vision, swarming even when he screwed his eyes shut."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Relief

**T** he worst of it came the first few weeks after Jem was born. Sue Walker lay in bed, blanket to her chin, toes open to the cold; her breath wavered, thin and shallow, and she was very sad. That much Kieren understood, if only because that’s how his father had explained it. Sad. Too sad to go to work, but she did. Too sad to cook, and clean, and help her son with school work, but she did. 

Afflicted with that sense of entitlement common to good children with good mothers, Kieren hadn’t appreciated this, or even recognized it. At least, not so much that he was conscious of her sacrifices during those weeks. To him, a sandwich in his lunch was a sandwich in his lunch, not evidence of an incredible mental strain, a small victory made in exchange for another hour bedridden, stricken, and stiff with cold in a warm room. Sad.

**Six years old, first year:**

He ate his sandwich mindlessly and mused to himself. He would never be that sad, wouldn’t be like that, never him. Sad was for old people and actors on TV. Sad was for mothers – for his mother.

Sad was for Sue Walker and, sometimes, her husband, when he sat at the edge of his wife’s bed and she wouldn’t look at him for all the love in the world. 

It had been dark, and the windows had their frames propped open to the night sounds. Steve Walker’s hair moved softly in the draft, but his body did not. It remained, with its hand on the ankle of a woman who couldn’t feel, because she didn’t want to; had his body shifted, it would’ve squealed like old metal. And, yes, it was a body, but it wasn’t Steve Walker, because it didn’t want to be. 

All this, Kieren had seen through the keyhole of his parent’s room, propped up on his toes – the earliest memories he had of his parents were in this warped sort of tunnel vision: down the barrels of locks, and under doors, and through sharp ventilator slats. 

He wished his parents would talk to him. Tonight, in particular, because his class was going to the museum that Tuesday, and he needed his waver signed. He needed them to do this for him.

He needed them.

He needed them.

 **T** welve years later, Kieren remembered this and he couldn’t breathe. It sent tremors through him, the guilt, starting in his stomach, threading in his wrists and ankles, up, up until it reached his chest and knotted there. He wanted to tear himself open, wanted _it_ to tear him open, but whatever _this_ was only succeeded in pulling him closer together. All at once he was too close and too far away from himself.

Kieren Walker ( in this moment, he could think of himself only in terms of his name, something to serve as a broad umbrella over a collection of moments) was everywhere, and he couldn’t stand it. He was lying in bed, illuminated by the electric red of his alarm clock, and he was standing by the desk at the far corner of his room, where the ghost of a breeze disturbed some sketches or some school work or some scraps of something. They curled and fell to the ground with a soft rustle. For a while, he just stared at them: pages, stark white against shadowed, evening blue. He stared, and remembered that permission slip – which his mother had signed. He remembered second year, when he’d cheated on a grammar test for the first and only time in his life. He had forgotten his workbook at school the day before, had rifled through his bag to find that it’d slipped his mind. His pale lips had trembled.

**Fourth year:**

Cassie McKenzie got the highest grade on their class project. The assignment had been to bring in a household object and sketch a still-life in charcoal. The teacher wasn’t wrong, though, because Cassie’s was better.

**The summer after eighth year:**

They had a fight – Rick started it, and Kieren finished it, with a shove square in the center of his friend’s chest. Taller and stockier, even at thirteen, Rick hadn’t wobbled, but the two refused to speak to each other . . . until they did. It took a week, and it was the longest they’d spent apart since the beginning of secondary school. Kieren apologized.

**That same summer, July, probably:**

Jem tripped, scraping her knee up while she and her friends were out on the moor. The skin was shredded, red slits poking through the bruises, visible and humiliating beneath the crimped hem of her school dress. Kieren told her she looked like a freak, like a weird, monster of a person that scientists had taken apart and sewn back together. Jem cried, ten years old and puffy-eyed. 

He had always been very imaginative.

**Ninth year:**

Sometimes, he and Rick would whisper to each other during class, their inconsequential, fleetingly hilarious conversations consuming most of English Lit. This class, in particular, became their make-shift water cooler, as Rick couldn’t stand the teacher (or the subject), and Kieren pretended to feel the same. He pretended until one day, when the teacher decided she’d had enough and snapped at them right in the middle of her lesson. Rick widened his eyes in mock terror, twisting in his seat to flash a stupid grin. Kieren waited until the other boy was facing front again before receding, red-faced, into his sweatshirt. 

**Eleventh year, second term:**

He stole some off-brand cider from the supermarket – lugged it under his shirt, and brought it to the cave, where he and Rick got themselves plastered even though they only had the one bottle between them (he’d been too scared to go for more on his first try). 

The next morning, he woke with his head in Rick’s lap and Mrs. Laurens, the local grocer, at his parents' ears.

“That kid a' yours,” she’d said, “drinkin’ and stealin’. It’ll come to no good.”

But Laurens hadn’t specified _which_ of the Walker kids was destined to become a career criminal -- brother or sister; so, Kieren blamed Jem, and his parents believed him. They usually did, even when he didn’t deserve it. 

That night, Jem snapped four of his CDs and left the shiny fragments in a pile at the base of his door. He didn’t mention it.

**Twelfth year:**

Candles, nicked months ago after Christmas dinner, flickered in the little recesses of their cave. They had crouched together for five minutes now, watching each other’s breath bloom white in the early spring chill. Kieren's attention had just shifted to identifying foreign sounds, footsteps, anything out of the ordinary, when Rick’s arm slid around his shoulders. Kieren stiffened, but eventually let his head sink into the rough vinyl of Rick’s jacket. Nausea twisted his stomach. His chest felt light. He felt light.

Except – 

**Twelfth year, still:**

Fuck Elaina Jannis. And fuck Rick. Fuck Rick, because he’d fucked Elaina Jannis, and then _told_ him about it. Sure, the actual _telling_ had resembled an apology, an explanation. But still. Fuck him. 

That night, Kieren stayed home without telling anyone. He let Rick walk to the cave alone and in the cold.

**Twelfth year, still:**

“Do you want _me_ to tell him?”

“What?”

“Me. I’ll do it. He already hates me, so it’ll be fine.”

“What? – Fuck no, Ren. You fucking joking?”

“No, I’m not ‘fucking joking.’”

“I’ll do it. Soon. I already told ya I’d do it."

“So you’re just gonna let him _shout_ at me?!”

“No, I told y—”

“You let him kick me out of Pearl’s! You just let him, Rick. No, don't lie, you _did._ And you’re just gonna keep letting him kick me out of your house, and the Legion, and everywhere, until there’s nowhere I can see you!”

“I don’t want to do it right now, Ren.”

" _I_ want to see you!”

“I know.”

“So do it! I’ll ask mum, and then you can stay at my place, maybe. Just – please do something.”

“Okay.”

And then Kieren said it, but didn’t make Rick say it back, out of pity and basic human decency. He knew Rick and, by association, he knew how to manipulate him. He told himself it wouldn’t happen again, pushing everything out of his mind and offering a thin smile, which was returned with an immediacy he didn’t deserve. Afterward, they sealed it – carving their names into the soft bedrock with his swiss army knife. 

**Twelfth year, still:**

He accidentally let slip to his parents that Jem and Tom Darkland had fooled round before school that morning. It wasn’t on purpose, he swore to her a couple weeks later. The conversation had grown and grown over dinner, until it was either Jem-and-Tom or Kieren-and-Rick that was to be wrung out and hung up. Sometimes, parents want confessions and they don’t care who from. 

Jem refused to see him for two weeks, relenting only after he'd spent the night outside of her bedroom door, his head lolling dangerously against the frame. 

He’d served his penance, but felt little in terms of redemption.

**Twelfth year, still:**

Rick hadn’t told. 

Kieren painted him in blacks, and greys, and broad, furious strokes.

**The summer after his 18th birthday:**

Three layers of clothes stuck, sweat-slicked, to his body. Night was falling and Bill Macy would be at the Legion, probably drinking, probably laughing with Gary, Dean, and everyone else who hated him. 

He surged up the main road, through the pub doors, and over to Macy’s usual table, which he’d mapped out after years of walking past the Legion’s broad windows, looking in sometimes to catch Rick’s eye, to pull a face just so that the other boy would have to choke down a laugh in order to save face.

Not anymore. Now, stiff-limbed and shaking, he stormed through the doors he wasn’t allowed past. Someone’s drink was edged into the corner of the table and Kieren grabbed it, spilling the beer, or the scotch, or the pint of _something_ into Bill Macy’s lap. Luckily, the owner of the drink gripped Macy by the shoulders. Kieren didn’t flinch.

There was nothing; no sense of relief, because Macy wasn’t the one who had driven Rick away. 

**September, this year:**

He’d heard Janet Macy’s screams that morning. Later, when his parents knocked on his door to confirm what he had feared for weeks, now knew, he couldn’t stand up to unlock the door.

**First year:**

He stood at his mother’s door with a permission slip, willing her out of bed.

 **A** nd everything crashed down around him now. All of it, every dishonest, selfish, stupid thing he’d done, the people he’d hurt, injured, and killed. They bore down – a phantom pressure on his chest and in his head. He saw them all at once, crowding into his line of vision, swarming even when he screwed his eyes shut. For the first time since Rick’s death, he cried, hitching and silent, until it occurred to him that crying wouldn’t help Rick, or Jem, or anyone. It wasn’t a release anymore, just another expression of self-pity. And so this feeling built inside of him, out of reach, out of control. Fuck. _Fuck_. He dug his nails into his thigh and willed himself not to cry out. Fuck.

“Kier?”

_Fuck._

Jem stood at the edge of his room, door knob still in hand. She looked smaller than she was, dark bangs fringing over her eyes, pale legs spindly and fragile where they poked out from under her nightgown. 

Kieren wondered what he must look like to her. If the visible jolt she gave was any indication, it wasn’t good: his jaw pulled taught, mouth open slightly, chin shaking, eyes gelled with minute-old tears. Disfigured. Like some kind of monster.

He was grateful for the dark.

“Don’t tell mum and dad.” The tremor in his voice took him by surprise, so he let it fade away, shriveling in the blackness between them. Silently, he begged her, and he didn’t know why.

“I’m not gonna.”

Relief.


End file.
